Series loyalists will recall the assassination of Queen Victoria
by Edward Oxford, an insane time traveler from the 23rd century. This time,
Burton finds himself, young and healthy, in 1864 but burdened by sharp memories
of himself as a dying old man; Swinburne reports similar recollections. Before
they have time to dwell on these matters, they climb aboard the rotorship Orpheus and
proceed to the 23rd century, where the Beetle, a strange creature who exists
simultaneously in multiple realities and, in some unfathomable way, is also
Burton, explains that they must be transported into yet another alternate past
where the Beetle’s complicated plot will knit up the strands of time broken by
the mad Oxford. Pause for breath. Back in 1861, however, things immediately go
wrong. Orpheus’ artificial
intelligence inexplicably falls silent; following a crucial meeting between Prime
Minister Benjamin Disraeli and genius Charles Babbage, Babbage vanishes, but
the intelligent robots he invented proliferate. Worse, Disraeli intends to
transfer the mentalities of the empire's ruling elite into immortal mechanical
bodies and thereby ensure their supremacy forever. Soon, London's parks become
concentration camps for dissidents, the state’s political enemies languish in
slave labor camps in India, and Burton and Swinburne battle hordes of
mechanical police. Though Hodder ties his time-travel rationale in knots, the
plot makes no sense anyhow. Yet when, all too often, the occasionally brutal,
sadistic action just plods, his dazzling inventiveness keeps things bubbling
along.

More of a mixed bag than hitherto, but regulars will find it
hard to resist.

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